Finding Hope in Truth Telling

I have a memory of the Washington Monument, pink in the glow of the sunrise, as I taxied to the airport, quite a breathtaking image. I once worked for a company headquartered in DC so have made many trips there. Recently I was returning for a conference.  This time, however, it felt as if I was entering enemy territory, a sentiment I’ve never felt even with past presidents with whom I’ve disagreed. I used to feel as if this was in part my city. Now with the current White House occupant, it felt tarnished. 

It was a bit like my first and only visit to Germany. Prior to that visit I always considered going to Germany verboten. This was the country that murdered my family. What can I say? I’m slow to forgive. Now I know Germany has worked to come to terms with its history, but I had this very strange visceral reaction to the beautiful landscape as the train headed towards my destination. I was angry. How dare it be so beautiful after the horrors they wrought. Only my purpose justified that visit. I was part of the first group of Jewish genealogists to do research in the Holocaust records.

Last year I came to DC shortly after the election for the Women’s March. That too seemed like sufficient justification to enter enemy territory. So, what brought me this time? For a number of years, I’ve attended a museum conference focused on Jewish museums (CAJM.net). I’ve learned that as an artist who tells stories, much of what I do echoes the work of museums. This conference was focused on the responsibility that museums bear to create dialogue and to tell the important stories of our time and our history truthfully. At their best they are truth tellers and play an important role as our society undergoes turmoil. When we talk of the role of the press and of courts in holding up a society that values core principles, we also should consider the role of museums in educating, challenging and engaging the populace.

While the conference addressed these topics, my visits to national museums, also underscored this. The two portraits of the Obamas had recently been revealed and I decided to focus my one free day on the National Portrait Gallery. My niece met me at my hotel and we walked to the nearby metro. When we entered the Gallery, the main attraction was clearly the Obama portraits. President Obama’s was in the Presidential Gallery while Michelle was located in a different area of the museum. 

A line, beginning in a large covered atrium, snaked toward the painting for those who wanted to take a picture of themselves in front of it. While that seemed a bit silly to me, at least for myself, it was actually quite touching to see a young African American child before the portrait, for whom the Obamas represented the idea of possibilities once thought unreachable.

The Presidential Gallery (also online) soon captivated me beyond the Obama portrait. There is a portrait of every president and a description of them as a leader and the times in which they were called to lead. I was struck by the fact that slavery was an issue that  presidents began to struggle with in the 1830s and it left its imprint on every administration up until the Civil War and its aftermath.

Now I must admit that I was not happy about the idea of our current occupant taking up space in the gallery someday, but was somewhat reassured by the fact that the text did not sugarcoat anything. If they were corrupt, it hit it head-on. And yes, we had some who were considered corrupt long before Nixon or our most recent occupant. There were several who wrought damage that took many years to right. Andrew Johnson ascended to the presidency after Lincoln was assassinated and Reconstruction took a turn as he supported returning power to the white Southern planters and depriving freed slaves of their rights. He came within one vote of being impeached.

Even the “good” Presidents had their flaws. It noted that Teddy Roosevelt opposed birth control for women, and immigration. Teddy!! For the most part they were men of their times and carried the beliefs and prejudices of those times. I was struck by the fact that Lincoln alone, seemed to transcend his times.

I was surprised and pleased to discover a painting of the four women Supremes and found much of interest in the museum's artwork.

At the end of my conference we met at the US Holocaust Museum and went through the exhibition. Here I was struck by the way Hitler positioned himself as the only one who could improve the plight of the country and the use of the People’s radio to pump out propaganda to the populace. The same position is assumed by the current occupant and the radio has become the cyber sphere. I closed my visit with several hours in the National Museum of African-American History and Culture after hearing the director speak eloquently at the conference. The museum goes from African culture and slave ships to Jim Crow laws and intimidation by lynching, providing a different perspective on the debates referenced in the portrait gallery.  It concludes by celebrating the influence black culture has had on our society in its many dimensions.

Normally I don’t get past the National Gallery. This visit felt especially rich in the history it shared and its relevance for today. The museums gave me hope that truths will be told. 

"Cake" News or Let Them Eat Styrofoam

Have you heard the story about the inaugural cake? The cake for Trump, which was a replica of a cake for Obama, was three inches of cake, the rest of the multi-tiered structure was styrofoam. Author, journalist and activist Masha Gessen shared this story at a recent CAJM conference to illustrate the sham so often present in a totalitarian regime. 

Gessen knows of what she speaks. She grew up in Moscow, leaving in 1981, only to return in 1991. She once again departed in 2013 when faced with the threat of children being taken away from gay parents.  As an openly gay journalist with an adopted son, she was under particular threat.

I had read, loved, and written about her book Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace so was looking forward to hearing her speak. Today she is often discussing Trump through the lens of one who grew up in Russia and lived there during the Putin years.  

She began by quoting Soviet dissident Andrei Sinyavsky, who once said that his “differences with the Soviet regime were primarily aesthetic.” She then elaborated on his meaning by exploring the culture of mediocrity that sets off the cringe reflex in anyone who places a value on excellence. That quality is very much reflected in the culture that surrounds Trump from his misspelled tweets to his incoherent sentence structure to his disdain for facts to the sheer meanness reflected in both his language and his budget. It is an embarrassment to be represented in this fashion.

All is sham and styrofoam layers where appearance matters more than reality. She spoke of how similarly Putin surrounds himself with staff who all have PhDs, but each one of them is plagiarized. Putin himself has been accused of plagiarism, which is quite common in Russia.

On the one hand she noted that Trump is all about raw emotion and public profile while Putin doesn't express emotion and had no public profile. Despite these differences they are similar in the way that they use language and lies. They exert power over reality by bully lying. She noted that Trump doesn't care if you believe his lies, but will continue to assert them to render you powerless like the bully who takes your lunch box.  Similarly Putin claimed there were no Russian troops in Ukraine, then said, oh of course there are. Reality is what they say it is.

Both disdain the public sphere and are contemptuous of public politics, the media, and how the public conversation occurs within a democracy. Gessen referenced Tillerson's first trip as Secretary of State without the press corp.  He noted that he didn't feel he had a use for them and would use them if he did.  She contrasted this CEO view of the press with the public servant view. A CEO is accountable to a board, a public servant to the public. The press corps is one of the vehicles by which the public servant view is implemented.

Gessen spoke about Perm36, the only gulag museum in Russia that was based on what was once a gulag camp during Stalin. In its later incarnation it served as a political prisoner camp until 1988.  In 2013 the museum was taken over by the state and those who created it were forced out.  It was turned into a museum glorifying the gulag.  Gessen spoke of a visit where the guide spoke of Sergei Kovalev, a well-known geneticist held there, as if the camp had attracted distinguished guests rather than the fact that he was imprisoned in solitary confinement for much of his time.  The museum was designed to create what she called "squishy reality" where nothing in the museum was clear, pointed or original.  It is much how cacophony works to muddle and confuse the public into silence.  

Gessen referenced the cacophony of the Trump administration as echoing this approach.  Nothing means anything because everything is quickly overtaken by something else.  There is always the shiny new object to distract us from public politics which needs to be our focus.  She stressed that it is our job to save the public sphere and it must be reality based.  The question she closed with is what will we be left with post-Trump and the risk he presents to both our language and the role of our media.  Critical thinking must be upheld lest we discover that all that is frosted is not cake. 

If you'd like to read more of Masha Gessen's analysis you can find her work at the New York Times or pick up one of her books, one of which takes a closer look at Putin is The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.

The Memory Jar

Where do ideas come from? So much of what I do is about communicating through story. I do that through writing, painting, public speaking and video. Before I can do any of that I need to take in content, to fill my mental gas tank with fuel. I need inputs as well as outputs lest I be running on fumes. Input comes from observation, interviewing, reading and education. Often that education occurs in the form of conferences and the past week I attended two of them, one in San Francisco and a later one in St Paul. I've since settled in back at home and am considering those inputs, what I learned that I might carry forward into my work.

The San Francisco conference was put on by the Council of American Jewish Museums (CAJM). It is a fun conference even for non-museum professionals because we visit museums, some Jewish, others broader in scope.

The theme was Open Source. So what does that mean? It is a techie term from the most techie region of our country. Open source promotes universal access by offering a free license to a product's design and universal redistribution of that design. It incorporates subsequent improvements to it by anyone. Think Wikipedia from which this definition comes.

Now carry that concept over to museums. For museums it means relinquishing control to let other voices and audiences in and engaging audiences and communities in an interactive process that changes the offering. In that process transformation can happen.  The question of the day is how do you become an agent of transformation? Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimlett of the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews spoke to that concept. At her museum they try to change the conversation, stepping out of the shadow of the Holocaust to engage audiences in understanding the integral role Jews played in the history of Poland. It is a reclaiming of 1000 years of history. She noted that she is often asked why the museum is in Poland. Her response is that is where there is an opportunity for transformation.

The other hot topic is engaging Millenials. Never did a baby boomer feel so passé. There was lots of focus on how to reach an audience that commits last minute, has a much broader definition of what is cultural and seldom would go to a museum alone. One of our speakers was a young woman from the Academy of Science in San Francisco who has the unique title of Nightlife Coordinator. She throws parties with science content that attract up to 2000 young people. They have themes such as time capsules, robots and sharks. How cool is that?

So what does an artist take from a museum conference? A concept I've already been developing in my work happened to dovetail nicely with a presentation on an exhibition of memory jars by Nina Simon, Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History.

I've written in this blog of a gift of a memory jar I once made for my mother many years ago. It was at a time when her memory was quite good and I never thought of it worsening. I purchased a ceramic jar that had the label "memories" carved into it. I then wrote out memories that we shared or that I had of her, some from our trips together, some from my childhood. The act of doing it touched me. It was a litany of what I love in her. The jar sat on a shelf high on the bookcase until I noticed it on a recent visit. I took it down and together we drew out each memory and remembered it together. Some she recalled, others took some assisted remembering. When we had gone through all the memories she thanked me for helping her remember.

My sister lives closer and goes in weekly. On one of her recent visits she heard a noise in the kitchen and poked her head in. There was my mother laughing at a memory from the memory jar.

In May I will be sharing several pieces on loss of memory at a caregiver conference and had been thinking of calling the series The Memory Jar based on a painting/collage with that title.

When Nina spoke she told us about the exhibit they did of memory jars. They invited visitors to fill a mason jar with objects tied to a personal memory. They also wrote a label that described their memory. Over three months they collected 600 jars.

As I sat in the session the wheels were turning. Was there a way I could make my exhibition interactive?

By the next session I had decided to include a memory jar with the exhibition and invite attendees to contribute a memory about their loved one, a memory perhaps no longer retained by their family member. The memory would represent the fact that they were now the keeper of the memory. With their loved one they could remember it together just as I did with my mother.

By a later session I was contemplating how to turn the memory jar into an art piece on its own and still later how I could work with the contents of the jar to create yet another art piece. This is a bit of a test, more limited in scope because of the short duration of the conference. A lengthier exhibition could invite more extensive participation similar to that of the Santa Cruz museum, but focused on the theme of memory loss. I returned a few days ago and the first thing I did was purchase a jar and paint it.

One other concept that was discussed at the conference was the Pop Up Museum. The Pop Up Museum is a temporary exhibit that is created by the people who show up to participate. They may bring objects such as the memory jars, but the concept is often very time limited and in unorthodox settings. I was chatting with a new museum friend about the fact that I wasn't employed by a museum when she looked at me and observed,"You're a pop-up museum".